Undisclosed ads on TikTok skirt ban on profiling minors

TikTok’s Massive Loophole: How Teens Are Still Being Bombarded with Targeted Ads Despite EU Laws

In a shocking revelation that’s sending shockwaves through the tech world, a groundbreaking study has uncovered how TikTok is exploiting a massive loophole in European Union regulations to continue targeting teenagers with highly personalized advertisements. Despite the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) explicitly forbidding the profiling of minors for advertising purposes, teens are still being bombarded with commercial content disguised as everyday posts.

The EU’s Digital Services Act, introduced to protect young users from manipulative advertising practices, defines “advertisements” narrowly, only covering formal ads purchased directly through a platform’s own advertising system. This leaves a significant gap in regulation, particularly when it comes to influencer marketing and undisclosed promotional videos.

To investigate how this plays out in practice, Sára Soľárová at the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia and her colleagues deployed sophisticated sock puppet automated accounts on TikTok. These bots simulated 16- to 17-year-old teenagers and 20- to 21-year-old adults, each assigned specific interests such as beauty, fitness, or gaming. The bots were programmed to scroll through TikTok’s algorithmic For You feed for an hour a day over 10 days.

“The only way for us as a society to understand social media is to study it behaviourally, and this is the way we do it,” explains Soľárová.

In total, the bots watched 7,095 videos over that period, with 19% of them containing some sort of advertisement. Of those advertising videos, around 56% were undisclosed ads, where creators and brands push products without using the platform’s required disclosure labels.

While formal, platform-purchased ads shown to the minor accounts were limited – and in some cases non-existent – and showed no signs of personalized targeting, the vast majority of the commercial content the simulated teens encountered fell into the undisclosed category.

These hidden ads were aggressively tailored to the teens’ inferred interests. For instance, when a simulated 16-year-old girl showed an interest in beauty, 92.1% of the undisclosed ads algorithmically fed to her explicitly matched that interest.

Overall, the researchers found that this hidden profiling of minors was five to eight times stronger than the level of targeting permitted for formal adult advertising, as measured by the gap between how often an ad matched a user’s interests versus how often it appeared for the average user. This matters because undisclosed ads made up the vast majority of what minors saw: 84% of ads they encountered were undisclosed, compared with 49% for adults.

“Formally, TikTok complies with the law because it does not profile the formal ads to minors,” says Soľárová. “On that note, TikTok is doing everything it can. But… the disclosed ads represent a small proportion of the total commercial content on the app.” TikTok declined to provide comment for this story.

“These undisclosed ads are a new form of targeted advertising: using consumer preferences to infer the type of content they see, platforms are able to seamlessly deliver more commercial content,” says Catalina Goanta at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Goanta believes that responsibility needs to be shared by a broader range of bodies, including regulators. “Influencer marketing has been traditionally understood very narrowly by regulators. Ads that are not disclosed are a harm to consumers,” she says. Soľárová echoes this point: “We have to expand the definition of what advertising is.”

This groundbreaking study has exposed a critical flaw in current social media regulations, highlighting the need for more comprehensive legislation to protect young users from manipulative advertising practices. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, it’s clear that lawmakers and tech companies must work together to close these loopholes and ensure a safer online environment for all users, especially the most vulnerable.

Tags and Viral Phrases:

• TikTok loophole
• EU Digital Services Act
• Teen targeting
• Influencer marketing
• Undisclosed ads
• Personalized advertising
• Sock puppet accounts
• Algorithmic targeting
• Social media regulation
• Digital privacy
• Online safety
• Content moderation
• Tech ethics
• Youth protection
• Advertising transparency
• Platform responsibility
• Consumer harm
• Regulatory gaps
• Hidden profiling
• Commercial content

,